Proud La Salle announces return with run to Sweet 16

Mar. 25, 2013
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La Salle guard/forward Rohan Brown (35) celebrates after the Explorers beat the Mississippi Rebels during the third round of the NCAA basketball tournament. La Salle advances to the Sweet 16 to play Wichita State in the West region in Los Angeles. / Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports USA TODAY Sports

by Steve Wieberg, Special to USA TODAY Sports

by Steve Wieberg, Special to USA TODAY Sports

For more than two long decades, La Salle fans fidgeted as Villanova, Temple, St. Joseph's and Pennsylvania snapped up recruits, won games and collected NCAA tournament bids. The Explorers fell to obscurity, going one 13-year stretch without a winning record, enduring 21 years without an NCAA invitation and largely slipping from the nation's radar.

Tom Gola? Lionel Simmons? They seemed - and were - long gone.

Sunday night, La Salle reannounced itself. A week after landing one of the tournament's last four at-large invitations, at the end of a grueling three-game, five-day stretch that started in the First Four in Dayton, Ohio, the Explorers defeated Mississippi 76-74 to join the Sweet 16 for the first time since the great Gola led them to back-to-back national championship games in the 1950s.

Just the sixth team to carry a No. 13 seed this far, La Salle faces ninth seed Wichita State in Thursday's West Regional semifinals in Los Angeles.

Cast the Shockers - who knocked out Gonzaga, the top seed in the West Region - as Cinderella if you will. But don't expect affirmation from a La Salle group steeled during the regular season in the impressively deep Atlantic 10 Conference. The Explorers took down Boise State, then Big 12 Conference co-champion Kansas State before beating Ole Miss.

"Absolutely not," says Ramon Galloway, the Explorers' leading scorer and the only senior in their playing rotation, who led them with 24 points Sunday. "I mean, it's a Cinderella story to the media and everybody that looks down on La Salle. Because ain't nobody had La Salle winning this much or coming this far in the dance. But for us, we already said through the whole year that we can play with everybody."

A team built on a formidable collection of guards, one of them - junior Tyrone Garland - recalls coach John Giannini seeking him out in the moments after the Explorers' 80-71 win over Boise State in Dayton, their first tournament victory since 1990.

"When 'G' recruited me, the first thing he told me was, 'I think you're the missing piece we need to get us back to the tournament, to get us back to the national stage,'" Garland says.

"After we won â?¦ he came over and hugged me and said, 'This is what we've been waiting for.'"

It was Garland who hit the game-winning shot against Ole Miss with 2.5 seconds left. Tied at 74, he drove the lane and gently tossed the ball against the glass. It trickled in, igniting a celebration on the La Salle bench and among the knot of Explorers fans in the stands behind it.

Recruiting revived

Playing in Kansas City lent some broader symmetry. This is where La Salle basketball ascended to greatness more than half a century ago, leaning on Gola in winning the NCAA's 1954 championship and returning to the tournament final a year later. The Explorers fell in that one to Bill Russell and San Francisco.

This La Salle team's three wins in the past five days are more than the school had won in the tournament in the 57 years since their glory days. Simmons, still the third-leading career scorer in Division I history, led a brief resurgence when he carried La Salle to three consecutive NCAA appearances from 1988-90, and the Explorers claimed a fourth berth in five years in 1992.

Then, recruiting fell off. There was the ugliness of a couple of rape cases involving three players that led to the resignation of then-coach Billy Hahn in 2004. While the rest of the Big 5 earned a combined 40 NCAA tournament berths, the Explorers were shut out and overshadowed.

Giannini, who'd had success at Division III Rowan and Maine, succeeded Hahn in 2004 and delivered an 18-win season two years later. There were some fits and starts before a breakthrough last season, when La Salle finished 21-13 and reached the National Invitation Tournament.

The foundation for this season, and perhaps beyond, was set.

"I'm the only senior," Galloway says. "After this, things could just get better."

Cracking the NCAA field was one thing. Advancing was another. The assignment to Dayton meant an extra game on the front end, and winning it brought the Explorers to a matchup with bigger, stronger, fourth-seeded K-State - the Wildcats playing just up the interstate from their campus in Manhattan, Kan.

La Salle stunningly roared to a 20-point lead in the first half, let it slip away, then gutted out the final six minutes on tiring legs.

Forty-eight hours later, the Explorers took down 12th-seeded Mississippi. Tired? They shot nearly 57% from the field in a breathless second half in which the two teams were never separated by more than five points.

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"In AAU (ball), you used to play three games in one day, and that was only, what, like three or four years ago," says junior guard Tyreek Duren, who hit the two free throws that tied Mississippi with 1:07 left and finished with 19 points.

"So it's nothing to me. We've been playing since, what, November? When you've made it this far, you can't get tired now."

Giannini deemed the extra game a positive, welcoming the Explorers' opportunity to work out their nerves, get their legs and fall into a tournament rhythm.

It was just two years ago that Virginia Commonwealth played all the way from the First Four to the Final Four in Houston.

"'G' has made that statement a couple of times and told us that, if they can do it, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to do it," Duren says. "We definitely look at that as motivation."

He and the other three featured guards arrived at La Salle in stages. Duren and Sam Mills signed in 2010. Galloway transferred from South Carolina a year later. Garland moved in from Virginia Tech after the fall 2011 semester.

Coming home

Galloway, a Philly kid, became the cornerstone.

Two of his brothers have landed in prison, one for robbery, the other for selling heroin and selling a stolen gun. At 16, he left their troubled neighborhood in Philadelphia to finish his last two years of high school in Florida. He signed with South Carolina, played two years with the Gamecocks, then headed back home.

The NCAA granted him a waiver to play immediately rather than wait the standard year after transferring. Galloway's father had been blinded when he was shot when Ramon was 2. His grandfather, Carlos Moore, was fighting liver cancer. Galloway had moved, in part, to be near them.

On the court, he has blossomed this season, averaging 17.2 points a game and hitting better than 40% of his three-pointers. He leads the team in assists and steals. He became the first La Salle player in seven years to be named first team all-Atlantic 10.

"He was the perfect player at the perfect time for us," Giannini says. "We underachieved a few years ago, didn't have great chemistry, but we really liked our young players."

"We thought that if Ramon got that waiver, he might give us enough experience, enough depth, to make us a legitimately good team, quicker than what most people would think. And that's what happened.

"We've been to the NIT last year and the NCAA this year. We've broken a lot of streaks."

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Among other things, the Explorers played the best perimeter defense in the A-10 this season - allowing opposing three-point shooters to hit just 30.3%. Mills got their biggest stop of the year at the end of the 63-61 victory over Kansas State, cutting off the Wildcats' Angel Rodriguez on the baseline and getting a hand on a final shot that never reached the rim.

Jerrell Wright, the one relatively big guy on the floor, came up big in that game, too. The 6-8, 240-pound sophomore, another Philadelphia product, hit all six of his shots from the field, scored 21 points and pulled down eight rebounds.

Round by round, whatever doubts there might have been about the viability of a four-guard lineup in the NCAA have dissolved.

"That's not even a factor anymore," Duren says. "I think teams are looking at it more like, 'Wow, how are we going to guard them?' Not looking at it as they have a size advantage. They see that doesn't work for us."

La Salle is positioned to make tournament history. Richmond became the first 13th seed to reach the Sweet 16 in 1988. Valparaiso, Oklahoma, Bradley and Ohio have done it since then, the Bobcats making their run last March.

None advanced any further.

And look around this year's bracket.

The Explorers are the last Big 5 representative left standing.

"The thing â?¦ is getting La Salle back on the map," Galloway says. "People always knew that La Salle could play. Now that we have our opportunity, we have to seize the moment and show everybody that La Salle is not just an Atlantic 10 team that's having a Cinderella run.